Ten or fifteen years ago, in response to the question: "what is soap?" you could hear (almost without hesitation or hesitation) something like this: "a substance (liquid or solid) intended for washing hands, face, body, etc." When I asked this question now, I often heard a counter-question in response-clarification: in what sense! This means that in modern usage, the word soap has such a wide and often thematically inconsistent scope of use that without clarifying or limiting semantic concretizers, people already find it difficult to answer this question unambiguously. At the same time, this word (and its derivatives) clearly illustrates one of the leading mechanisms of language development - the law of asymmetry of the language sign by S. I. Kartsevsky. Let me briefly recall the essence of this law: the plan of content and the plan of expression of a word are in a state of dynamic disequilibrium - the plan of expression tends to convey new semantic content, while the plan of content "looks" for new ways of linguistic expression. Kartsevsky gives the following example: "Suppose that in a conversation page 59 someone was called a fish. Thus, a homonym was created for the word "fish", ... but at the same time a new member was added to the synonymic series: "phlegmatic, sluggish, insensitive, cold", etc." (Kartsevsky S. On the asymmetric dualism of the language sign // Zvegintsev V. A. History of linguistics of the XIX-XX centuries in essays and extracts. Part 2. Moscow, 1965, p. 90). In the literary language, the word soap has not changed its meaning, but it leads an extremely active semantic and word-forming life in the sphere of jargons and professional vernacular, which exert quite a strong pressure on the modern language consciousness. That is why the word soap evokes many associations-based on the language experience and everyday life of each individual person. If in the 19th century the word soap had two main linguistic associations: "detergent" and - formed by ... Read more